Sciences of Education Effects Philosophy | antivirus

Philosophy challenged by the Sciences of Education: between enchantment and sobering up?

Against the backdrop of his "entry" into the sciences of education, the author attempts to show that the hazards linked to a composite and unstable discipline also fulfill a role of stimulants for philosophical reflection. Indeed, the questioning of the field and its actors, instead of dispersing the philosophical requirement, renews and enriches it. The support on three notions considered as analyzers - subject, value, belief - exemplifies a philosophical orientation escaping the dominant fashions, chapels, and presence, to develop ever more precisely the object "education" impossible to reify, constitutively endowed with its own lines of flight.

The dice thrown

The recipients, in the Greimassian sense, do not always know that they are, or what they are doing. When this gentleman straight in his boots, dispatched by Paris to the gates of the Tunisian desert landed at the small local airport, in the middle of a sandstorm, my philosophy course in the final year was already well under way.

TOPIC: suspicion, suspense, and overheating

3In the 1970s, and for a long time to come, the subject was dead, as was the man for that matter. As much as those who still and always consider themselves as an apprentice philosopher can get excited about the charge thus carried out, supported by philosophies of suspicion, against the subject - illusory, lacunary, ideological, but whose weight annoys -, as much the one who is one day, after studying philosophy, appointed to the field of so-called unsuitable childhood as the trainer of specialized teachers cannot escape the elementary observation: the subject, sometimes wounded to the point of madness, he would rather overflow, he 'would foment in a continuous stream, several subjects willingly disputing not only the heads of pupils, children "of troubled intelligence" (Gibello, 1984),

Hay of coquetries

5Far, then, are we the poses, coquetry, philosophical poise so well worn in the city, by those who, often masters or favorites of the media, regulate with broad lines and lively harangues the questions of the school. The modesty with which phenomenology, for example, has historically been both put at the service of psychiatry without alienating itself from it, and conceptually renewed in this implication would be to be illustrated at length. The philosophy teacher who discovered these fields in the 1970s found institutional psychiatry (Jean Oury), existential analysis (Ludwig Binswanger), genetic psychology in the midst of debate (Piaget-Wallon), as supports. lively debates around language (Noam Chomsky- Jean Piaget, 1979), in short, delicate and thoughtful clinical implementations that prevent,

VALUES: lower case, upper case, excess, loss?

6The same is true of the issue of values. Outside the field of Educational Sciences, this is certainly not to say that we hardly speak about it. Everywhere we do not cease to deplore their "loss", their erosion, their anomic disorder ... However, as a gap appears between on the one hand the philosophical analyzes which, indeed, through the taking into account of the drives, the affects, the events of truth, of the body without an organ, of small intensities, in short - which prolong the small perceptions of a Leibniz -, engage our most sharp contemporary thinkers in explaining the so-called postmodern change, and, on the other hand, the clinical developments in the educational field.

Beliefs and Hope

7It is certainly on this site that education calls into question the human sciences and philosophies the most in the ideological positions they induce. It is also on this ground that the Sciences of Education have the most difficulty in developing a critical philosophy of the influences relating to beings in the making.

When such radical supporters of a naturalistic philosophy without any transcendence, like the admirable Marcel Conche, insist on posing the philosophical exercise as a performance of total autonomy of thought, we can clearly see that the whole educational dimension, the whole autonomy becoming random and the critical management of influences is marginalized, properly excluded from the philosophical sphere. antivirus.

A dramatic delay

8This is the real project, for which we are dramatically behind schedule.

To add a new discipline of religious fact, on the same didactic mode which updates, for example, citizenship, will never do more than “school” in the bad sense of the term what concerns everyone - from the supposed zero point of a healthy atheism, to the true mystical impulse (which is missed by any reduction to pathology) - via the ideological euphoria of militancy, the blindness of which can be analyzed just as much, according to the subject's desire for strong meaning (JT .Desanti) - namely the existential need to pose oneself even slightly clearly in relation to final ends that our finitude foments in various imaginaries anyway, at the very heart of the most haughty and far-sighted knowledge.

A Specificity?

10In the internal polarizations of their field, the Sciences of education, decried as excessively composite, can appear, on these essential articulations of spaces of belief and knowledge, more rigorous than the postures uncoupled from the social. We knew in their time the State Ideological Apparatus, in the sense of Althusser (AIE) ,. Are they more harmless, the Ideological Devices of the Media (AIM), so favorable to the rents of rhetorical situation denigrating the school on the pretext of wanting to save it or, more exactly, to restore it?

Science and Hope

Hope (and its "principle" in the sense of Ernst Bloch) is something quite different from a socially determined "level of aspiration", from a "horizon of expectation" but also from a "relation to knowledge. »Modulating the symbolic elements that govern access and the knowledge path. Crossed by all these logics, it is experienced and expressed differently, in interlacings between "knowledge, opinion and faith" that a Francis Jacques (2005) for example, analyzes in their pragmatic specificity.